Books — my new old hobby

Published on October 19th, 2012

In my childhood I read a whole lot. I really digged a fine number of children's books, like The Three Investigators, Famous Five, and a lot of others. I read countless ones and about 99 per cent of those where rented at the local library.

A little later I started buying books and the Harry Potter novels were some of the first books I possessed, accompanied by the majority of Dan Brown's novels and a few from Ken Follett, just to name a few. Unfortunately I completely stopped reading books a while after that. The internet was upon me and I completely lost the interest in fictional novels and the experience of letting your imagination work for you. I guess I arrived in the digital age, explored the internet where everything was fast and new, while books implied heavily a heritage of the past.

Now several years older, and hopefully more mature, I decided to give books another try. So, a few months ago I got myself a Kindle and with that combined the digital age with the beautiful experience of reading a story for hours.

What I experienced since then is mind-blowing even compared to the large quantity and frequency I managed to read in my childhood years. In the first two weeks I read four novels (by the way the brilliant series of David Hunter novels by Simon Becket — great thrillers, you can grab them here: No.1, No.2, No.3, and No.4) and that alone blew me away.

By now I made reading a big hobby again and I grab my Kindle in every free minute throughout the day. A little while ago, I would spend sleepless nights in front of the computer screen, trying out random stuff, basically wasting time on things that would lead nowhere. Now I spend the same sleepless nights reading. The world that is connected 24/7/365 stays outside and for the time being, I don't even care about it. Sure, the reading leads to nothing more than the knowledge of another story. But using your imagination in that amount is a great stimulation. Greater than brooding over the web, sometimes even fudging things to keep busy.

Getting a Kindle was the best idea I had in a long time and I regret, not having started earlier. And I would like to propose a rule to live by: Everybody should read. It's a great balance for the hectic life that's all around us. It takes your mind off the things causing you otherwise uninterrupted contemplation. Everybody should take at least one hour per day, maybe to rest after lunch or —even better— as a bedtime ritual, reading something that suits their interests. But it has in all accounts to be done offline.